AMD to open R&D facility in Israel

Fabless chip maker AMD is to convert its newly-acquired Israeli toolmaker Graphic Remedy into a research and development facility in the Tel-Aviv area.

In doing so, the outfit is straying into rival Intel's home turf. Intel is the biggest employer in Israel - outside of government and the arms industry - where it has numerous fabs and R&D facilities of its own.

Ben Bar-Haim, corporate vice president of software development at AMD reckons, “The creation of this new R&D center in Israel and the talent we already have on site greatly contributes to AMD's worldwide innovation ability. With this recent investment in Israel we are also continuing to promote and enhance the developers’ heterogeneous ecosystem for the AMD Fusion accelerated processing unit (APU).”

Graphic Remedy was a start-up specialising in software applications for the 3D graphics and parallel computing markets, specifically for developers programming with OpenGL and OpenCL. Its flagship product, gDEBugger, is an advanced OpenCL and OpenGL debugger, profiler and memory analyser which is now available for free. The firm was acquired by AMD in September 2010.

AMD adopted Open CL for its GPGPU range in 2008 and the framework is a fundamental building block used by companies looking to port or write applications that can run across heterogeneous computing platforms.

Graphic Remedy founders, Avi Shapira and Yaki Tebeka, are to take up key roles at the new AMD facility.